Analyze Me!

May 02, 2011

Economist: Religion

Religious studies

The good god guide

Tentatively, scientists are asking: exactly what is religion, and what is it for?

Apr 20th 2011 | from the print edition

RELIGION is ubiquitous but it is not universal. That is a conundrum for people trying to explain it. Religious types, noting the ubiquity (though not everyone is religious, all human societies have religions), argue that this proves religion is a real reflection of the underlying nature of things. Sceptics wonder why, if that is the case, it comes in such a variety of flavours, from the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church to the cargo cults of Papua New Guinea—each of which seems to find the explanations offered by the others anathema.

To bring a little scientific order to the matter, researchers taking part in a multinational project called Explaining Religion have spent three years gathering data on various aspects of religious practice and on the sorts of moral behaviour that religions often claim to govern. The data-collection phase was wrapped up at the end of 2010, and the results are starting to be published.

At the moment, most students of the field would agree that they are still in the “stamp collecting” phase that begins many a new science—in which facts are accumulated without it being clear where any of them fit in. But some intriguing patterns are already beginning to emerge. In particular, the project’s researchers have studied the ideas of just deserts, of divine disapproval and of the nature of religious ritual.

One theory of the origin of religion is that it underpins the extraordinary capacity for collaboration that led to the rise of Homo sapiens. A feature of many religions is the idea that evil is divinely punished and virtue is rewarded. Cheats or the greedy, in other words, get their just deserts. The selflessness which that belief encourages might help explain religion’s evolution. But is the idea of universal just deserts truly instinctive, as this interpretation suggests it should be?

Mysterious ways

To test that Nicolas Baumard (then at Oxford, now at the University of Pennsylvania) used a computer to check people’s reactions to a modern morality tale. Dr Baumard’s volunteers read about a beggar asking for alms, and a passer-by who did not give them. In some cases the pedestrian was not only stingy, but hurled abuse at the poor man. In others, he was skint and apologetic. Either way, he went on to experience some nasty event (anything from tripping over a shoelace, via being tripped up deliberately by the beggar, to being run over by a car).

The question asked of each volunteer was whether the second event was caused by the passer-by’s behaviour towards the beggar. Most answered “no”, the assumption being it was the shoelace, or the beggar’s foot, or the car. But Dr Baumard also measured how long each volunteer thought about the answer—and he found that when the passer-by had behaved badly to the beggar and then suffered an unrelated bad incident, volunteers spent significantly longer thinking about their answers than when the passer-by had behaved well, or the beggar had tripped him up deliberately.

Dr Baumard’s interpretation, though he cannot prove it, is that the volunteers were indeed making a mental connection, during this extra thinking time, between the passer-by’s actions and his subsequent fate. In other words, they were considering the idea that he was getting his just deserts, dished out by some sort of universal fate.

That interpretation will require a lot of further testing. But it tallies with a second result from the project, which looked at the idea that God is always watching you.

To investigate this, Dr Baumard teamed up with Ryan McKay of the University of London and Pierrick Bourrat of the University of Sydney. Together, they checked whether subtle cues about being observed had an effect on people’s behaviour.

The eyes have it

In this case they invited their volunteers to rate the acceptability of two acts—keeping the money from a lost wallet and faking a résumé. Half the volunteers were given the task written on a piece of paper which also included a picture of a pair of eyes. The other half saw an image of flowers with their instructions. The upshot was that those who saw the eyes rated both misdemeanours as more serious than those who saw the flowers.

Again, that proves nothing. Prying eyes need not indicate a supernatural watcher, and people are well-known to have their consciences pricked when they are under non-divine scrutiny as well. But it does indicate a mental process that religious ideas of a judgmental, omniscient god would be able to tap into.

To explore that idea further, Dr Bourrat joined forces with Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland. Together, they pored over the World Values Survey, a poll of 87 countries that asks respondents, among other things, about their religious beliefs and the acceptability of a range of infractions, from littering to adultery. The upshot of Dr Bourrat’s and Dr Atkinson’s analysis was that people whose religion includes an omniscient, judgmental god (Christians, Muslims and so on) regard the whole range of such transgressions more harshly than those, such as Buddhists, whose religion does not. (Agnostics and atheists think like Buddhists.)

Ritual questions

The ideas of just deserts and of the nagging of conscience are both, in essence, private to each brain. But a third religious idea that might foster co-operation is very public indeed. That is the idea of shared rituals.

Harvey Whitehouse, also of Oxford, thinks these different ways of remembering are harnessed by what he sees as two distinct aspects of religiosity. The doctrinal religious mode, as he dubs the first of these aspects, favours frequent but not particularly exciting rites that allow large bodies of teaching to be stored in a person’s semantic memory. That explains Friday prayers in Islam, or daily mass for the more enthusiastic sort of Catholic.

The second aspect—the imagistic mode, in Dr Whitehouse’s terminology—relies on rare but highly arousing events that are etched into the episodic memory by dint of their emotional salience. In principle, these could be either cheerful or unpleasant. However, since depths of trauma are recalled more vividly than heights of euphoria, religions should, in his view, prefer the former. Which, indeed, they do.

In one particularly grisly rite of passage, for example, young men belonging to Australia’s Aranda tribe are first circumcised and then pinned face down as several of their elders bite the initiate’s scalp and chin as hard as they can, before slitting his urethra with a stone blade. That is the sort of thing you are not going to forget in a hurry. You are also going to feel a strong affinity with those others who have gone through it, and perhaps a certain disdain for those who have not—a solidarity-building exercise, then, if ever there was one.

To test his prediction about there being two basic types of ritual, Dr Whitehouse recruited the assistance of Dr Atkinson. Together, they compiled a database of 645 rituals from 74 cultures, drawing on the Human Relations Area Files, a large collection of ethnographic material. They rated each ritual’s frequency and the level of arousal involved. As predicted, though low-arousal rituals are more common than high-arousal ones, there is a tendency (see chart) for ritual behaviours to cluster at either end of the arousal spectrum.

The next step is to enlarge the trove of data further—in particular by adding historical information to the contemporary sort already in it. The researchers may also extend their net to non-religious rituals, from hazing by army special-forces groups, to the intoning of corporate hymns. This is the aim of a follow-up to Explaining Religion, which is due to begin in earnest later this year. It will bring together anthropologists, archaeologists, evolutionary psychologists and historians, and will trawl though 5,000 years of history, recording rituals as it goes.

So, even though Explaining Religion did not actually achieve its rather ambitious eponymous goal, it has found some promising avenues of investigation, and led to that great desideratum of science, more research. Most importantly, though, it has opened to disinterested investigation an area of human behaviour that all too rarely sees it. That alone is worth celebrating. Happy Easter (or other Spring fertility festival of your choice).

Early religious archaeology

An Easter enigma

Whatever happened to the Hebrew Christians?

Apr 20th 2011 | from the print edition

THE fate of the Jews who followed Jesus is one of the puzzles of the history of monotheism. The New Testament has much to say about a related issue: the dilemmas faced by Jesus’s non-Jewish adherents. There was a hard argument about how much, if any, of the Jewish law and custom such converts should keep. But when it comes to followers of Christ who were Jewish by culture and religious practice, the evidence is hazier. Such people clearly existed: the Epistle to the Hebrews, a deeply enigmatic section of the New Testament, is addressed to those who were steeped in the lore of the Jewish Temple, and wondered how the self-sacrifice of their crucified Master related to the animal sacrifices of their ancestral faith. Then there is a handful of references in other texts to Christians who fled eastward from Jerusalem before the Roman-Jewish war of 66AD. One account speaks of an exodus towards Jordan, after the Christian bishop, James, was attacked in the Temple courtyard.

The subsequent history of the Hebrew Christians has been obscured by centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, and by Jewish resentment of Christianity. By the fourth century, a ferocious Cypriot bishop was describing a group of people whom he deemed heretics because they kept the Mosaic law—but who were also loathed by fellow Jews because of their belief in Christ. As in so many conflicts, people who straddled the divide upset both sides.

All that helps explain the excitement generated in recent weeks by the emergence of a collection of lead codices, which might, if they are genuine, throw light on the missing links in Christian and Jewish history. Some 70 or so ring-bound “books”, with up to 15 leaves each, are said to have been found, along with other artefacts, in a cave in Jordan, near the place where the Hebrew Christians seemingly took refuge.

They are now in the possession of an Israeli Bedouin, but the government of Jordan has claimed ownership, saying they came to light on Jordanian soil a few years ago. Amid much confusion, the objects’ keeper asserts that they have been in his family for a century. Ziad al-Saad, head of Jordan’s antiquities department, has said this could be the biggest find since the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. David Elkington, who is writing a book about the lead “books”, backs Jordan’s claim, saying it offers the best chance of ensuring the artefacts are open to scholars. An Oxford laboratory, after testing one of the codices, believes the lead might be 2,000 years old.

Two British authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philip Davies and Margaret Barker, have argued, after seeing images, that the codices—and their possible Christian link—should be taken seriously. But a dissonant voice has come from Peter Thonemann, an Oxford University historian who was shown a photograph of a copper engraving, apparently found along with the lead codices; what he saw, at least, was a crude forgery, he insists. But so far, no scientific authority in a position to judge has seen more than a fraction of the objects.

If they are authentic, the lead objects tell a teasing Judeo-Christian story. There is writing in an ancient script, Paleo-Hebrew, which was used by Jews largely for ceremonial purposes. The writing is mostly indecipherable; it may be in code. The imagery features the Jewish feast of Sukkot, which is both a harvest thanksgiving and a celebration of the Jews’ sojourn in Egypt. During this festival, celebrants brandish palm fronds (bound up with willow and myrtle) in one hand and a lemon-like fruit, the etrog, in the other. This is familiar Jewish material, but some may ask what it has to do with Christianity.

A good question. In various forms, most Jewish festivals found their way into the Christian calendar. Imagery and language from Sukkot occur at many moments in the Christian year; in the stories of Christ’s birth, baptism, transfiguration, and most obviously at Palm Sunday, when Christians wave palms (or in Russia, willow twigs) to commemorate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. In Christian commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures, it is stressed that Sukkot was associated with the advent of the Messiah and with the coming of all nations to worship in Jerusalem. So images of Sukkot would be dear to the heart of Hebrew Christians.

None of that proves a Christian connection. The imagery might also be consistent with an alternative theory which was aired in the Jewish Chronicle, a British weekly: that the codices belonged to forerunners of the mystical tradition which became known as Kabbalah. But by stirring a discussion about the resonance of certain images to Jews and Christians alike, the lead objects have refocused attention on a deep but contentious commonality.

Easter

A date with God

Holy fires and calendrical quibbles

Apr 20th 2011 | from the print edition

A regular Wednesday date

RELIGIONS have a rum relationship with calendars. They invite people to enter a reality that transcends all the limitations of time, space and finitude; yet faiths are often disputatiously obsessed with pinning down the precise moment at which certain cosmically important events occurred or should be celebrated. Christian quarrels over the date of Easter are a perfect example.

Both the Western and Orthodox Christian churches use a complex system, based on the spring equinox and the lunar cycle, to compute the date when the resurrection of Jesus Christ (and the rites that follow and precede it) should be marked. But the methods of calculation are different. This year, as last year, Western and Eastern Christians happen to agree; but the Easter dates can be as much as five weeks apart.

That can pose problems in places where Orthodox and Western Christians rub shoulders. One lot may be holding lively Paschal celebrations while the others are observing a Lenten fast. And even a common Easter date can pose difficulties, for example at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem where six Christian communities jostle for space: Catholics who wish to visit Christ’s tomb on Easter Saturday must turn up extra-early (at 5.30am) because of security measures for the exuberant Orthodox Holy Fire ceremony a few hours later.

Only in a handful of places do Easter celebrants alter their own arrangements to take account of their neighbours. Finland’s Orthodox Christians mark Easter on the Western date. And on the Greek island of Syros, a Papist stronghold, Catholics and Orthodox alike march to Orthodox time. The spectacular public commemorations, involving flower-strewn funeral biers on Good Friday and fireworks on Saturday night, bring the islanders together, rather than highlighting division.

Could the wider Christian world ever converge on a single date? It seems unlikely. An Orthodox calendar reform of 1923, which aligned Christmas and other fixed festivals with the Western dates, led to a deep division within the Christian east; the Russians, Serbs and some conservative Greeks refused to go along. Many Orthodox are wary of any changes that could cause more splits within their ranks.

If the movement for a common, or permanently fixed, Easter date ever gains ground, a Cambridge University professor, Colin Humphreys, has made a proposal. Using a mixture of literary and astronomical sources, he thinks the actual date of crucifixion was April 3rd in the year 33AD. That places the last supper (which he thinks happened on Wednesday, not Thursday as traditionally believed) on April 1st, and the resurrection on April 5th. So, he is asking, why not celebrate Christianity’s defining event on, or as near as possible, the day it happened?